Are these the missiles that Russia ran out of in March 2022, March 2023 and then in June 2023 or the other ones?
I suspect that people are a little more cautious about corruption whenever the results are regularly tested, e.g. if they think the missile they make this month gets shipped to the front line next month, and if it doesn't launch they will be personally posted to a flood-prone trench near a dam in the Dnipro river.
ICBMs are supposed to not get launched outside of tests, they're meant to defend a country by their mere existence threatening mutually assured destruction. This doesn't work so well if people (like me) openly doubt they work. It also means that corruption is much easier to hide, which in turn means it's much more likely to happen. (This latter point also applies to the USA's arsenal, FWIW, but that only matters to the extent that anyone fears the USA collapsing into its second real civil war).
Possibly. Given how much of the rest of the Russian forces turned out to be paper tigers, I wouldn't be surprised if 80% of the missiles' flight computers are missing something flight critical and 80% of the warheads have unenriched (or even outright depleted) uranium instead of weapons grade uranium or plutonium, with the real stuff having been lost (or never made in the fist place) due to corruption, and the SLBMs… well, thinking of replaying history, the Kursk comes to mind.
And while I don't think much of the promises of western anti-ICBM defences, they're probably still at least a bit better than the Russian delivery mechanisms.
Certainly possible that we'll see a repeat of Germany WWI -> WWII when the Russians collapse, I think that fear was why the west tried to be supportive of Russia when the USSR collapsed.
> "this assumes USD hegemony is a distant memory. does bitcoin have the largest weapons cache and standing military in the history of humanity?" is just bunk.
Sure. "Largest weapons cache" is too vague anyway — anyone can tell that the number of longbows don't matter too much any more, but sometimes we get people surprised that battleships also don't matter any more.
(Also: I thought the largest standing army was China, anyway?)